Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT We Are The Table
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 13 | Aired on 09.08.2008
"Dear Silas. Uh. Thanks for raising yourself these past eighteen years. You've done a great job." She nods quietly to herself; this is admission of guilt and confession of sins. She nods to herself, hearing the words come out. Without Andy she'd never have known, how good this feels. How terrible and wonderful it feels.
After long silence: "Ms. Botwin. Are you okay, Ms. Botwin?" Nancy shakes her head and doesn't speak to Carol. She says no, but silently. It is written on her breath; it's written on her body and the way she says yes and no to the darkness of the borderlands; how they're both applicable at once. She gasps quietly.
Remember the punishment light? Remember how close she came, to admitting what the bear looked like? It was so long ago. This is a portrait of grief, for a whole life and all the lives it touches and destroys. I am the table.
"Silas. You are loved. Me. Sign it, 'Me.'" Just 'Me'? "Yeah. Me. No, 'Mom.' 'Me, Mom. '" All these little Nancys, in their little boxes. In a bowl of stones and bones. "Please, please get that to him tonight." And the saddest line in the whole wonderful, brilliant, terrifying scene: "And add the butter cookies. You can charge me extra, okay?" Moms give sons cookies, that's what moms do. Silas needs cookies. Silas needs to know he has a mother and that she tried, and he needs to taste this going down, to remember her this way, even as he's becoming a man before her eyes: butter cookies, soft and sweet and warm, like a hug. The very last hug she'll give him, if this goes down. And then he'll be an orphan. "You take care, Ms. Botwin." Three miles to the border.
The camera pushes through kids skateboarding; one of them rides up to Shane and the goth-skanks. He's not Rad, but he might as well be. He buys a sandwich and rides away.
Esteban plays with his cufflinks and tells Nancy he doesn't want to believe it, the allegations, the betrayals. His men watch; she smiles sadly, contrite, and tells him not to. That it's as simple as that. And it is, when you're Nancy. "I thought you loved me," he says, like a boy; she looks him right in the eye and tells him the truth, the thing that shouldn't be true but is, the thing that makes all of this so goddamn complication: "I do love you."
"You have made me ... so sad." She's sad too. She offers to make him happy again, with her secret; he doesn't hear the import and tosses down the picture of her with Till. Her eyes fall; his heart's breaking. She reaches for her purse and Cesar steps forward. She looks up at Esteban, and he nods Cesar off again; the look on Esteban's face gives her a sense of triumph, and of shame: She produces a picture of her own: an ultrasound. Their son's first portrait.